Sunday, November 29, 2015

This is
the fourth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

Kedma (Amos Gitai)

Gitai’s
latest exploration of Israeli history is much more successful than last year’s Eden, although that’s largely a result
of visceral pleasures: his one-take approach to battle scenes, for example, is
almost unmatched (and I include polished films like Saving Private Ryan). Actually starting with a virtuoso single
take, aboard a ship bringing a group of refugees to Israel, the film follows
some of the group as they evade British soldiers and then travel toward a
kibbutz, encountering Arab resistance on the way. The film is extremely similar
in tone and style to Gitai’s earlier work Kippur:
well-staged action alternates with debate and soul-searching, and the dialogue
can seem very forced at times. In general though, Kedma effectively sets out the contradictions at the heart of
modern Israel, never more so than in an anguished closing monologue (“I think
that Israel isn’t a Jewish country anymore”) on how Jews are pushed to violence
(Jewish history is “a history imposed by goyim”). And the film inevitably gains
power from its foreshadowing of current conflicts. “We’ll remain here in spite
of you,” shouts an old Arab at the Jews who stole his donkey in the course of
their journey, “like a wall…we’ll be hungry, we’ll be in rags. But we’ll defy
you.”

In America (Jim Sheridan)

An Irish
couple and their two daughters settle illegally in New York (fortunate enough
to find a large vacant apartment on their first day). They live on a
shoestring, always haunted by the recent accidental death of their young son.
For all of their troubles, New York remains a largely mystical atmosphere,
especially with the mysteriously charismatic black painter living downstairs,
and there are suggestions of celestial forces weaving through their lives
(aren’t there always?) The print shown at the festival qualifies “In America”
as a working title – maybe the final title should be “In Dreams,” because this
sentimental romanticizing of poverty doesn’t seem to have much to do with real
life as I’ve ever seen it. Ambling along as these anecdotal kinds of films
always do, it has the occasional good scene, but the grander ambitions fall
flat. Key among these is a concept of the father as closed-off and distant, so
unable to engage with life that at one point his daughter accuses him of being
an impostor; but it doesn’t come across, maybe because actor Paddy Considine
seems even more stilted than the character he’s playing. It adds up to a vastly
derivative project, teetering under the layers of uplifting mysticism that
Sheridan has it carry.

Secretary (Steven Shainberg)

Shainberg’s
debut film, about the sado-masochistic relationship between a bottled-up lawyer
and the disturbed young woman who comes to work for him, could be seen merely
as a catalogue of kinky ideas, and perhaps can’t be seen as much more than
that. So the value judgment all depends how you respond to the movie’s
extremely accommodating attitude. Personally, I liked it nearly all the way
along, with doubts really only arising over the ending, which casts the final
state of the relationship in rather conventional terms. In particular, the
final shot, in which she stares straight into the camera, daring us to judge
her, is too strenuous a statement of feminist credentials. That’s nearly the
only unsatisfying shot of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, who seems to have figured
out every nuance of her character. James Spader initially seems to be playing
his part more conventionally and superficially, but this is but one of many
ways in which the film’s deftness might initially be underrated. Some of the
weirdest (which I guess equals the best) ideas are almost thrown away, which
must be a sign of confidence. The film has already opened commercially since
the festival, and it’s taken some knocks for its exploitation aspects; your
enjoyment of the movie should be pretty closely correlated with your tolerance
for the premise.

Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)

Miyazaki’s
feature-length animated film has also opened commercially since the festival
(where it played as Miyazaki’s Spirited
Away). It’s the biggest hit of all time in Japan, and in the recent Sight
and Sound poll it received three votes as one of the best ten films of all
time. I’m no anime connoisseur, and
this film’s veins of cuteness, occasional visual flatness, and general
weirdness could confirm one’s prejudices – if you ignored the genuinely unique,
seemingly otherworldly imagination on display here. It’s about a young girl who
wanders with her parents onto what they think is an abandoned theme park – the
parents find and eat some food that changes them into pigs, and she finds
herself working in a bathhouse for the spiritual world. Miyazaki has worked out
every detail of the environment: the film has eye-popping spirits, and
explanations of the water-pumping system; boys that turn into flying dragons,
and railway systems that aren’t what they used to be. This has its serious
undertones – the festival brochure cites “the strength and insight of
innocence…the disintegration of religious faith and other forms of
spirituality.” But I question whether the film’s mysticism and theme of belief
in oneself are inherently that profound. The magic is in Miyazaki’s almost
disturbingly uncategorizable creativity, and a visual style that perfectly
expresses both the simplicity and complexity of his sensibility. I enjoyed Spirited Away as much as an animated
film I’ve ever seen.

The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki)

Kaurismaki’s
latest film initially resembles a piece of baroque science fiction – a man gets
beaten up, is declared dead, comes back to life but without any memory of who
he is, and establishes a meagre living for himself, including a mild romance
with a Salvation Army worker. As he becomes more secure in his new identity,
the film becomes looser and more discursive – and, for me, distinctly less
interesting. Much of the second half consists of musical performances by a
Salvation Army band that he coaxes onto a more popular style – they’re nice
enough songs, but it’s indicative of a somewhat flabby movie. One of the
picture’s abiding pleasures is its cinematography – especially in the early stretches,
containing some of the most vivid colour compositions since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Sadly, the
film seems to tone this down as it progresses, perhaps as another reflection of
his escalating normalization. And although the Festival brochure promised “one
of the great performances by a dog on screen,” the dog too fades away as the
movie goes on. The film starts off as one of Kaurismaki’s most muscular and striking
works and ends up seeming run-of-the-mill for him – it adds up to a highly
watchable but disappointing effort.

A film
consisting of eight short segments by eight famous directors. Like most
previous exercises along these lines, it’s a disappointment, evidencing little
inherent reason for existing. The segments all deal in some way with the
“phenomenon of time,” but this vague mandate isn’t enough to lend the project
much coherence. The best are probably Bertolucci’s – an elegant glide through
episodes in the life of an immigrant – and Godard’s: working in the kind of
collage-form he’s used on many other occasions, he expands the scope and
emotional resonance of his segment beyond what the others achieve. Radford
comes in a surprising third, using an old-hat science fiction premise but at
least investing his sequence with good design and mild panache. As for the
rest: Figgis uses the same four-screen/one-take technique he used in Time Code – nothing new ensues. Menzel
juxtaposes scenes from the life of a Czech actor, achieving only mild poignancy
(although I note that this sequence made the woman beside me cry). Szabo’s is a
well-handled but basically mediocre one-take melodrama about how quickly a life
falls apart. Denis’ segment is all talk. Schlondorff’s juxtaposes a banal
voice-over with a banal series of images – the only distinction being that the
sound and image are banal in quite different ways. For all its philosophizing,
the film’s main contribution to the study of time is to raise the question of
how such a film can seem to last so much longer than it actually does.

Julie Walking Home (Agnieszka Holland)

Holland’s
film is about the fragility of both the secular and the spiritual; about how
slight shifts in the equilibrium cause calamitous shocks. It’s not really that
distinctive a theme, especially when presented in what is by now her familiarly
overwrought style (see for example her last film The Third Miracle). Miranda Otto and William Fichtner are
common-law spouses whose happiness is torn apart by his one night stand – then
their son is diagnosed with cancer. She takes him to Poland in search of a
famous faith healer who falls in love with her. Much about the picture – the
mix of accents, locations, tone and ideas – has the feel of something pulled together
to satisfy a committee of competing interests, although the competition may all
dwell within Holland’s own sensibility. Her film has excellent moments (Otto is
especially striking, almost frightening, in her seductress mode) but it becomes
increasingly clear that the film has nowhere in particular to go. Like the
birds to which it returns as a motif, it merely circles, before choosing a
resting point that may be either arbitrary or deliberate (a distinction that
may matter to the bird, but not to the onlooker).

Lilja 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysson)

Swedish
prodigy Moodysson show here that he can work in a much darker register than his
first two films, Show me Love and Together. The film tracks a miserable
three months in the life of a 16-year-old Russian girl, who’s left alone when
her mother skips with her boyfriend to the States. With no source of income,
she slides easily into prostitution: the film is especially strong on depicting
the near-inevitability of this fate for women in dire circumstances. When she
finally meets an apparently nice guy who says he’ll find her a job in Sweden,
he turns out to be a procurer of child whores. It’s gloomy subject matter, with
almost every scene yielding some new tragedy or squalor. The young actress
Oksana Akinshina is disconcertingly unemotive through most of it. But the film
is ceaselessly perceptive and sensitive, without ever becoming sentimental, not
even when it depicts her visions of the over-dosed friend she left behind, now
sporting angels’ wings. The film was one of my favourites of the festival – not
as artistically imposing as Talk to her
or Dolls, but bringing a strong
individual voice to a work of diligent anthropology.

Marie Jo and Her Two Loves (Robert Guediguian)

Every
year, the festival selects one director for its retrospective spotlight
feature. Guediguian, this year’s choice, sets all his films (the best known is Marius and Jeanette) in working-class
Marseilles, and generally works with the same actors – his work thrives on intimate
recognition. His latest is no exception. It’s the story of a woman simultaneously
in love with her husband and another, finding that the weight of her love
carries an inverse correlation to that of her happiness. “I only feel at peace
when I make love,” she says, “otherwise I suffer.” The movie portrays this
state adeptly, and is equally good at depicting the loneliness of being the man
she’s not currently with. Guediguian paces things deliberately (some would
certainly say slowly), spending much time on the details of their jobs and on
inconsequential moments. He achieves the authenticity for which he aims, but
can’t dispel a sense of familiarity (whether measured against his own previous
work or that of others who’ve explored this territory). Towards the end, Marie
Jo’s daughter erupts at her parents in idealistic disgust, and you realize how
muted the film has generally seemed prior to that point. And while it seems
clear that the director might profit from expanding his range, the swirling
tragedy of this film’s final image isn’t a particularly effective step in that
direction.

La ville est tranquille (Robert Guediguian)

The
spotlight on Guediguian also included this film from 2000 – perhaps his most
ambitious and most successful. A social epic along the lines of John Sayles or
Robert Altman’s films, it weaves together some grim and often heart-rending
stories of people trying to get by. A woman who works at the fish market
prostitutes herself to buy drugs for her addicted daughter; a laid-off
dockworker tries to make it as a cab driver but sinks into financial troubles;
a black man is released from prison. Right-wing politics percolate in the
background. The director’s at full strength here; intently focused on his characters,
allowing us to feel the quiet desperation that mainly defines their lives (the
muted quality of Marie Jo is more
successful here because we understand it as a reflection of demands and pain
that defy words), tracking occasional eruptions of joy and hope, of pain and
despair. The film has a slight penchant for melodrama, which threatens to disrupt
the verisimilitude, and the hopeful final image seems a little idealistic, but
Guediguian doesn’t pretend there are easy answers for any of this, and his film
as a whole seems wise and balanced.

Sunday, November 15, 2015

This is
the second of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

All or Nothing (Mike Leigh)

Leigh’s
last film Topsy Turvy was an
unexpected departure for the master of low-income British angst, and a complete
success. The new film, back on familiar territory, inevitably looks like
treading water by comparison. It’s loosely structured around three miserable
families in a drab London housing complex – they drink or eat too much, or lose
themselves in sexual role-playing, or in random anger, or superficial good
spirits, or just in all-consuming inertia. Timothy Spall plays a cab driver,
trapped in his own misery, avoiding all responsibility. Sensing himself on the
verge of disappearing completely, he finally breaks out, resulting in a series
of scenes that, if a little over-emphatic, almost rank with Leigh’s best work.
That plot strand arrives at a generally happy ending, but Leigh lets the other
two stories drop completely; in cinema as in life, he seems to be saying,
positive outcomes are largely a matter of chance. Like every Leigh film, All or Nothing is crammed with fine
moments that shine a passing spotlight on a secondary character, anchoring the
film in the world beyond the frame. But it has a more muted tone than most of
his work, making less overt use of comedy, and most viewers will find it less
insinuating than something like Secrets
and Lies.

Too Young to Die (Park Jin-Pyo)

This
Korean film has a simple purpose – to celebrate the love of a man and a woman.
This is out of the ordinary only because the couple are in their 70s, and they
have a lot of sex. It shouldn’t be a surprise that older people can do it
multiple times a week, sometimes a day (the man helpfully marks each session
off on his calendar so we can follow along), but if it wasn’t a surprise the
film presumably wouldn’t exist. It’s somewhere between documentary and fiction
– seeming to have a script, but played by a real life couple who aren’t
professional actors. Objectively, it’s a pretty voyeuristic project (the film
shows the sex in some detail), but it doesn’t feel that way, mainly because the
couple (especially him) are so happy to show themselves off. For the sake of
balance, the picture shows a few rough patches, such as a spat about her
staying out too late with her friends. But if it was ever in doubt that the
movie takes a sentimental view of its subjects, then the incredibly sappy
closing song would wipe it away. Almost incidentally, you notice that their
living conditions are pretty meagre, and there’s the odd reminder of cultural
differences (when he wants to make her a chicken dinner, he buys a live bird
and slaughters it in the yard) but these observations come only intermittently,
amid the calculated universal appeal.

Auto Focus (Paul Schrader)

Schrader
(who made American Gigolo and one of
my all-time guilty pleasures, the remake of Cat
People) ought to be the ideal director to film the story of Bob Crane, the
genial stay of Hogan’s Heroes who
became obsessed with sex and pornography as his career declined. Auto Focus tells the story efficiently
and intriguingly, but it doesn’t particularly look like a Schrader film; it
doesn’t seem interested in plumbing the depths of Crane’s soul, and the echoes
of Bresson that used to mark Schrader’s work are just a memory here. In a way,
Schrader should be praised for his self-effacement. He certainly captures both
the bounce and optimism of Crane’s rise to fame in the 60’s, married to his
college sweetheart with no darker secrets than a few racy magazines hidden in
the garage, and the tackiness of his decline in the 70’s. But this isn’t a
chronicle of the age like Boogie Nights
– it’s a rather hermetic story of one sad figure, and in telling it so
straight, Schrader risks our indifference. Willem Dafoe is rather
one-dimensional as the hedonist who led Crane astray, and Greg Kinnear’s
performance in the lead role sums up the picture – wholly convincing as the nice
guy, but generally just too convivial and straightforward to be particularly
interesting. There are many good moments though – his meltdown on the set of Celebrity Cooks, hosted by Bruno
Gerussi, is especially well caught.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce)

Noyce
used to make provocative little Australian films, but in recent years he’s been
the anonymous general behind such epics as Clear
and Present Danger and Silver.
This film marks a home-coming: it’s about three half-Aboriginal girls in 1931,
sent 1,800 miles from their home to a special school for “half-castes.” The
film makes it clear that there were many such “shadow children,” and has a
chilling scene where Kenneth Branagh, as the leader of the cleansing program,
explains the official philosophy on the matter. The children escape and set off
to walk the vast distance home. Most of the film is devoted to their journey
and how they evade the state’s efforts to catch up with them – including a
veteran tracker played by David Gulpilil, who starred thirty years ago in
Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout. The film is
gripping, and evokes suitable anger at what the children endured. But maybe
Noyce has become too efficient a storyteller – you feel very little of the
passage of time, or the incredible distance they covered, or of their hunger or
thirst. This is one of the rare films that’s actually too short – we feel
short-changed on the bigger picture of Australia at the time, the visceral
experience of the journey, and the story’s potentially mythic underpinnings.
The evocation of Walkabout reminds
you how that and other movies found real grandeur in the desert.

Waiting for Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako)

Mauritanian
director Sissako’s film is suffused in ambivalence about Africa – he celebrates
its beauty and mystery, but constantly returns to images of departure and
escape (or more frequently, failed attempts at departure) and thoughts of a
different life. The film is loosely structured, and the exact meaning of what
we’re watching isn’t always clear – the most recognizable plot strand involves
a young boy serving as apprentice to an aging electrician, accompanying him
from job to job. Initially the film may seem opaque, but you adjust to its
rhythm. It’s crammed with gorgeous images, such as the electrician and the boy
hooking up a light bulb to an outlet and then carrying it into the desert for
what seems like miles. It’s a dream-like Africa, encompassing desert and city
and village and the water’s edge – parameters that hold the characters in place
even as their parched spirits tell them to move on. The old man remembers a
friend who offered him the chance to leave; finally the friend went without
him, never to be seen again. “Maybe that’s what weighs on my heart,” he says:
it’s the skill at depicting this weight through images that makes Waiting for Happiness such an eloquent
work.

Sunday, November 8, 2015

This is
the first of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

Ararat (Atom Egoyan)

Egoyan’s
opening gala presentation certainly doesn’t seem like the work of a great
filmmaker; it evokes instead a disgruntled academic translating his theories
onto celluloid. Set in present-day Toronto, it examines the continuing
spiritual and emotional impact of Turkey’s massacre of Armenians in 1915.
Characters include a director (Charles Aznavour) who’s making a film on the
subject, an art history professor (Arsinee Khanjian) who’s a consultant on the
picture, and her troubled son. Ararat
doesn’t purport to present the objective truth of what happened in 1915, and
acknowledges that there are problems in the historical record; it dwells on the
difficulties of sustaining memory and remembrance. That aspect of Egoyan’s film
is fairly interesting, but it’s filtered through some very cumbersome emotional
set-ups and bizarre artistic decisions (for example, much of the film consists
of a labored dialogue between the son and an overbearing customs officer played
by Christopher Plummer). The messiness isn’t without consolations, but it makes
for a distinctly dutiful, visually undistinguished viewing experience. The use
of the film within the film, including a gala premiere at the Elgin, seems like
mere navel-gazing, but then Egoyan doesn’t exhibit much sense of the real world
– you’d think from Ararat that 1915
was the number one conversation topic in our city.

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar)

Almodovar
has mastered the art of making outlandish narratives seem as natural and
graceful as a dance. His new film, in which dance is actually woven prominently
into the design, revolves around two men, both in love with (wait for it) women
in comas. One (who, in typical Almodovar fashion, thinks of himself as being
more gay than straight) sees this state as an enhancement rather than an
impediment; the other is understandably more ambivalent. Events build to a
shocking violation that Almodovar somehow manages to render smooth and
understandable. He has the old-fashioned virtue of liking his characters – his
benevolence is almost boundless, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness. But
this is as beguiling a movie as he’s made (even after the clear artistic
advances of Live Flesh and All About my Mother). It shifts gears
and perspectives with imperceptible ease, sliding forwards and backwards in
time in a way that makes most narratives of that type seem highly
self-conscious. It’s poised and consistently beautiful, even if the broader
insights (the title sets out the main message – the importance of
communication) don’t amount to much.

10 (Abbas Kiarostami)

It’s
always in question whether Western viewers appreciate the work of an Iranian
director like Kiarostami too much through our own prism (reflecting our own
morals, ethics, aesthetic tradition, sexual politics, received notions about
Iran). This may be especially tempting with his new film 10 (not a remake, obviously, of the Blake Edwards semi-classic),
which consists solely of ten one-take scenes of a divorced woman, driving in
her car with various passengers. In the first scene, her young son lambasts her
as a bad, stupid mother; shortly afterwards she picks up a whore who scoffs at
her moralistic questions. Later on in the film, the son again criticizes her
for various things, but by then she takes it much more in stride. In the later
scenes she counsels a distraught woman not to depend so much on just one
person, and advises another to loosen her veil (which in such a physically
controlled film generates considerable visual excitement). As the film
progresses, the increasing use of cross-cutting between characters seems to
reflect a growing sense of security and engagement on her part. The film thus
appears to be primarily an illustration of a woman’s growing sense of
self-determination as she adjusts to life on her own, but I suspect it may be
subtler than a single viewing can appreciate. Intriguing as 10 is, I think many Kiarostami fans may
miss the broader canvases of his earlier work.

Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and Luis Pepe)

In 2000,
director Terry Gilliam finally rolled film on his long-cherished adaptation of Don Quixote. The project came with an
unrealistic budget, inadequate rehearsal and preparation time, looming chaos,
and memories of his 1989 over-budget fiasco The
Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (which earned him a reputation as an
undisciplined enfant terrible, not overcome by subsequent relatively saner
projects such as The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys). The first day saw a
freak storm that instantly threw the schedule into disarray. By the end of the
first week, lead actor Jean Rochefort was in the hands of his doctors with a
herniated disk. The film struggled on through a sixth day before collapsing
completely, sending millions of dollars and Gilliam’s dreams down the tubes.
Miraculously, Fulton and Pepe had cameras rolling on the whole thing, resulting
in one of the most vivid portrayals of filmmaking ever made. Gilliam starts off
somewhat enamoured of his own legend (“Without a battle, maybe I don’t know
exactly how to approach it”); when on the first day he asks how they’re doing
for time and the response is “Bad,” Gilliam reflexively snaps back “Good.” His
childish giggle when something goes well is infectious. But as disaster engulfs
the project he seems overwhelmed, almost paralyzed. His Don Quixote film, from what we see of it, would probably have ended
up much like Munchhausen – a treat
for Gilliam fans, mainly a curio for anyone else; the fact that we’ve been
denied that film, but given Lost in La
Mancha instead, probably isn’t a bad trade-off.

Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach)

At the
age of 66, Loach is working faster than ever, alternating missions into
unfamiliar territory (Spain in Land and
Freedom, Los Angeles in Bread and
Roses, one of his least successful efforts) with projects on home ground
(or at least Scotland, which is close enough). Sweet Sixteen doesn’t have much new about it, but it’s expertly
handled; no one captures the aspirations (or profanity) of the British
under-privileged as expertly as Loach. It follows a boy gravitating from
selling smuggled cigarettes to upward mobility in the local drug syndicate, all
before turning 16. He dreams of seeing his imprisoned mother free and clean,
but sees no irony in getting her there on the backs of junkies. Actually, irony
isn’t really one of Loach’s standard tools (compared say to skillful
tub-thumping) although the situation provides it in abundance (“I used to watch
my dad do this,” says a young pusher nostalgically, as he cuts the heroin).
Loach’s biggest weakness, for me, is his propensity for gangster figures and
their attendant melodrama. Still, this is a consistently gripping, moving work.

Monday, November 2, 2015

Last week
I wrote about the difficulties of getting one’s money’s worth out of a DVD
collection, given that the new movies keep on coming. Here’s more evidence: seven
mini-reviews (count em!)

Happy Times

Readers
may remember an article, a few years ago, in which I put together a fictional
list of directors that might have won the Nobel Prize for cinema, if such a
thing existed. My 1996 winner was China’s Zhang Yimou, a choice that now makes
my imaginary committee look severely impulsive. Since then, Zhang has made
various small-scale films that bear the limitations of trying to work within
the Chinese State system, and he’s seemed increasingly sentimental. His latest
marks a further regression, back to the emotional values and overall
sophistication of, well, the silent era. A bachelor in his 50s sets out to get
married, but instead ends up taking care of a blind girl who’s been mistreated
for most of her life. Having lied about his resources and status, he creates a
series of illusions to hide the truth from her. The movie’s main point of
distinction is its highly contingent happy ending. It’s not that the film’s bad
exactly – it’s just awfully minor and unambitious. I might not have minded it
at all, if I hadn’t kept kicking myself for letting my Nobel jurists lose their
heads over his earlier work.

Sunshine State

John
Sayles’ cross-section of small-town Florida life seems less accomplished than
earlier films of his like Limbo, Lone
Star or City of Hope, which
executed similarly ambitious exercises in Alaska, Texas and New Jersey
respectively. Having said that, Sayles seems on this evidence to consider
Florida a less accomplished place – a blandly low-input and low-return would-be
paradise where sterile design destroys all sense of history, place and
community. The film follows four or five main plot strands, although nothing
tops the brief glimpses of a local dignitary’s compulsive suicide attempts. The
film peters out more than it actually ends, but that seems like Sayles’ final
comment on the state – where he sealed off his Alaskan movie Limbo with a grand metaphysical
flourish, he lets his Florida movie fizzle and dissipate. Sunshine State also contains a hearty dollop of what seems pretty
much like standard melodrama; it’s always been Sayles’ oddity that he insists
on his integrity as an independent filmmaker, who then makes movies the greater
part of which could fit quite comfortably into the mainstream.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

A bit fat
box-office hit, which does as much as any bland action blockbuster to show how
undemanding audiences can be. I didn’t register a single original joke or
observation in this compendium of clichés and platitudes about the travails of
an ethnic family (you’ve seen the same thing done with Jewish weddings, and
Italian weddings, and gay weddings…) Familiar Toronto locations (subbing for
Chicago) and faces make it even less convincing for local audiences. Nothing in
the movie is quite right – lead actor John Corbett overdoes the laid-back
charm, and lead actress and writer Nia Vardalos overdoes her initial frumpiness
and thereafter underdoes whatever quality is supposed to have snared Corbett.
And after plodding through the build-up to the wedding, the event itself is
over almost before it’s begun. Maybe if I were Greek it would have seemed like
a masterpiece of observation, although I have a Greek friend, and she sure
doesn’t act that way.

The Believer

At the
time of writing I haven’t actually seen the end of this film. With no more than
ten minutes to go, the Varsity projector broke down and they couldn’t get it
back up. Still, I saw enough to know that The
Believer is a near-must see. An astonishing creation about a Jew who embraces
Nazism, the film is the most articulate of the year, and one of the most subtly
perverse: the character’s escalating violence and radicalism coexist with a
longing to reimmerse himself in Judaism. Ryan Gosling gives a fine, fiery
performance in the title role. The film is sometimes too cluttered, and events
take place on such a melodramatic scale that they threaten to swamp the
character, but the worst never happens (not up to the last ten minutes anyway).

Signs

It’s a
hit, and some think that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is the next
Spielberg, but I found this film dreary, shallow, and unremittingly
pretentious. Its central notion about faith and predestination is inherently no
more than earnest in a first-year philosophy student kind of way, but
Shyamalan’s genius is to set this against the backdrop of an alien invasion of
Earth, thus ensuring goofiness just one notch short of Edward D. Wood. And the
sillier the thing gets, the more seriously it seems to take itself. Mel
Gibson’s solemnity fits right in with the prevailing gravity. As for the
Spielberg comparison, I’m not among the greatest aficionados of Minority Report, but that film
outclasses this one by every worthwhile criterion. By the end of this preachy,
self-regarding farrago, I started to dislike Shyamalan personally.

Blood Work

Clint
Eastwood’s new film, on the other hand, is a model of self-effacement. This
thriller about a retired cop who investigates a woman’s murder (while carrying
her donated heart in his chest) has a pretty intricate plot, but lets it unwind
with so little emphasis and elaboration that you could almost miss it. This
lets some potentially interesting elements go floating away, but leaves behind
something most intriguing – a tersely written and shot procedural that
nevertheless feels like a character piece. The trouble is that the characters
are distinctly sleepy. As recent Eastwood movies go, Blood Work is more unified than Absolute
Power or True Crime, although the
zest of James Woods in the latter would have given the new film a welcome shot
in the arm.

Possession

Another
inherently odd project – a literary detective story contrasting a modern-day
love story between two academics (Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow), and the
object of their investigation: a 19th century romance between two
poets. The film is directed by the normally acerbic Neil LaBute, and often
seems like a change of pace for its own sake – it takes considerable pleasure
in the eccentricity of British high-cultural circles, which seems here as
deviously political as the white-collar slaying ground LaBute depicted in In the Company of Men. Perhaps
appropriately, most of the film consists of elements that are interesting
mainly in theory. It has its moments of grace, but never overcomes – and indeed
apparently welcomes – a pervasive diffident quality.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).